"I am, sir; yours to command," swaggered the wretch.
"Then I may tell you that your daughter," the Archdeacon continued, resuming something of his natural self-possession, "was left in my charge by your wife, and that I am here in consequence of that arrangement."
"Gammon!" Mr. Kent replied, distinctly, putting his tongue in his cheek. "Gammon! Do you think that that story will go down with me? Do you think it will go down with any one?"
"It is the truth."
"All right; but look here, when did you see my wife? On her death-bed. And before that--not for twenty years. Well, what do you make of it now? Why," he exclaimed, with admiration in his tone, "you have the impudence of the old one himself! Fie on you, sir! Ain't you ashamed of hanging about stage doors, and following actresses home at your age? But I know you. And your friends shall know you, Archdeacon Yale, of the Athenæum Club. You will hear more of this!"
"You are an insolent fellow!" the clergyman cried. But the perspiration stood in great beads upon his brow, and his quivering lips betrayed the agony of his soul as he writhed under the man's coarse insinuations. The awkwardness, the improbability of the tale he would have to tell in his defence flashed across his mind while the other spoke. He saw how cogently the silence he had maintained about the matter would tell against him. He pictured the nudge of one friend, the wink of another, and his own crimsoning cheeks. His son's unwonted silence, too, touched him home. Yet he tried to bear himself as an innocent man; he struggled to give back look for look. "You are a madman and a scoundrel, besides being drunk!" he said stoutly. "If it were not so, or--or I were as young as my son here----"
"I do not see him," the man answered curtly.
"Jack!" the Archdeacon cried, purple with indignation. "Jack! if you have a voice, speak to him, sir!"
"It won't do," Mr. Kent replied, shaking his head. "Call him Charley, and I might believe you."
"Charley?" repeated the Archdeacon mechanically.